“Ah,” said the Earl, “you give me just the assurance I wanted. I need not hesitate to tell you, in that case, that my great desire is to push Rintoul for the county. If you had thought of it yourself, it would have been a different matter; but otherwise everything points to him—his position, our circumstances as the natural leaders, and the excellent chance he would have with all parties—better than anyone else, I believe. You could be of the utmost use to us, Erskine, if it does not interfere with any plans of your own.”
Now John had no plans; but this sudden check, after the sudden suggestion which roused all his ambition, was too much like a dash of cold water in his face to be pleasant to him. But he had time to collect himself while Lord Lindores was speaking, and to call up a sort of smile of assent, though it gave him a twinge of ludicrous pain. It was poetic justice. He had faltered and said No, in order to be encouraged and made to say Yes, and his vanity and false modesty, he thought, had got their reward. And all this for Rintoul! He remembered Rintoul well enough when he was not Rintoul at all, but Robin Lindores—a poor little lieutenant in a marching regiment. And now he was in the Guards, and the heir of an earldom. The change of position was so great, that it took away John’s breath. In the days of their former acquaintance, there could not have been the smallest doubt which was the more important personage—young Lindores, who had nothing at all, or John Erskine, with a good estate which everybody accepted as much better than it was. But now he had gone down, and the other up. All this went through his mind ruefully, yet not without a sense of amusement in his own discomfiture. He had not much confidence in his own abilities or enlightenment, but it was not much to brag of that he had more of both than young Lindores. However, he had nothing to do in this sudden concatenation but to listen respectfully yet ruefully as the Earl went on, who seemed to have grasped him, present and future, in his hands.
“It is a wonderful comfort to be able to calculate upon you,” he said. “My son-in-law—for of course you have heard of Carry’s marriage—would have a great deal of influence if he chose to exert it; but he has his own notions—his own notions. You will understand, when you make his acquaintance, that though a sterling character, he has not had all the advantages that might have been wished, of acquaintance with men and knowledge of the world. But you, my dear Erskine, you know something of life. By the by,” he said, as he rose to go away, “Lady Lindores charged me to engage you to come to us tomorrow. We are going away to town, but not for more than a month. The ladies insist that they must see you before they go. We all look forward to seeing a great deal of you,” the Earl added, with that manner which was always so fascinating. “Between you and me, our dear neighbours are a set of prejudiced old rustics,” he said, with a confidential smile, as he went out; “but it will be strange if you and I together cannot make them hear reason.” Could anything be more flattering to a young man? And it was the father of Edith who grasped his hand thus warmly—who associated him with himself in a conjunction so flattering. John forgot the little wrench of theoretical disappointment—the ludicrous ease with which he had been made to give place to Rintoul. After all, something must be sacrificed, he allowed, to the heir of an important family—and the brother of Edith Lindores!
But this was not his last visitor on this eventful afternoon. The Earl had scarcely disappeared when Rolls once more threw open the door of the library, in which John usually sat, and announced with much solemnity Mr. Torrance of Tinto. The man whom the Earl, though vouching for him as “a sterling character,” had allowed to be wanting in knowledge of the world, came striding in with that air of taking up all the space in the room and finding it too small for him, which wealth and a vulgar mind are so apt to give. That John should dislike him instinctively from the moment he set eyes upon him, was nothing remarkable; for was not he the owner of the most obnoxious house in the neighbourhood? the man to whom Carry Lindores had been sacrificed? John Erskine felt, as he rose to meet the newcomer, a sense of the shabbiness and smallness of his own house, such as, even in the first evening of disenchantment, had scarcely affected him so strongly before. When his visitor cast round him that bold glance of his big, projecting, light-blue eyes, John saw through them the insignificance of the place altogether, and the humility of his own position, with a mortification which he could scarcely subdue. Torrance was tall and strong—an immense frame of a man, with very black hair and dark complexion, and something insufferably insolent, audacious, cynical, in those large, light eyes, à fleur de tête. His insolence of nature was sufficiently evident; but what John did not see was the underlying sense of inferiority which his new visitor could not shake off, and which made him doubly and angrily arrogant, as it were, in his own defence. It galled him to recognise better manners and breeding than his own—breeding and manners which perhaps he had
